( idk )

[caipirinha]

Packing up the entirety of his belongings into neatly labelled boxes, taking care to conserve as much space as he could to minimise exactly how many boxes were used, was a strangely easy task. He had expected to feel some kind of sadness about his circumstances, a long and dreary night of procrastinating into the small hours whilst contemplating the meanings behind his various objects and the meaning they held to him. As it happened, however, it did not seem that very many of his possessions held much meaning to him at all, and he was finished by half past ten. A decade’s worth of trinkets, the occasional cushion and simple cutlery, all of it rendered suddenly quite useless. Instead of descending into one cliché of feeling, he fell straight into another, and now he felt nothing, nothing at all. To be honest, he would have preferred tortured ruminations. This was a distinctly unpleasant sensation. Malcolm Shapiro sat on the edge of his edge, the only item left in the house that hadn’t been stripped down to its barest details, and wondered if he had been asleep for the last ten years. Everything in his memories was a blur of corporate memos and tailored suits and cocktail evenings. Although he had not yet realised it, Malcolm (“But please, call me Mal,” uttered almost daily like a mantra to remind him who he was) was suffering a poignant crisis of an individual who did not have a bad life, but rather a life that had not suited him and that he had not wanted. Perhaps there was something symbolic that arose in his mind while packing away his things that suddenly triggered the realisation that he had been on auto-pilot for a very long time. This was a break in the routine. It was the formal awakening. He wondered why it had taken him this long to realise. After all, he’d lost his job almost a week ago. Well, it was a bit unfair to say that he “lost” his job, as such. More accurately, he had been pre-emptively and rather kindly relinquished of his duties to the company he had worked at fresh out of college because in ten days it was set to declare that one of its leading partners had been embezzling money from right underneath everyone’s noses for almost fifteen years, at this point, and was about to go under rather dramatically and publicly. Mal had actually been quite touched that their forward thinking in the event of an enormous disaster had included him, though he was, at the same time, quite cynically sure that there was some kind of ulterior motive that he was entirely unaware of. Either way, he did not particularly care. He was really quite glad to be out before the proverbial shit hit the fan. The partner in question, he had mentioned on his way out the door, had always struck him as a sleazy looking one. Mal conceded that his epiphany had come late on account of the fact that he had spent most of the week organising to have his decidedly trendy apartment put back onto the market and battling moving companies with strange stipulations in their terms and conditions. A little bit of this time had also been afforded to wondering why it was always the same old story. Person A is already very wealthy, but is somehow dissatisfied and must continue to acquire money faster, through illegal means that ultimately leads to their being caught and the company either suffering or going bust completely. Mal could not bring himself to understand where the dissatisfaction with life came from, only that he suspected it came from deeper issues that were not solely obsessed on acquisition of material goods. He liked to be able to afford things, his rent, his comfortable, expensive suits, but he was always comparatively sparing with his money, despite having plenty of it. His friends – well, acquaintances, really – at the company would chatter about their swish new cars, about their ridiculously expensive holidays, about purposeless things done just because they could. Mal could accept that that sort of lifestyle appealed to them, but he never saw it himself. Every offer to spend a weekend skiing in Aspen with “the gang” or whatever was always politely declined. Somehow, these events always succeeded in coinciding with a trip to Virginia to see the family. His mother often asked why he had suddenly started appearing on the doorstep so much more regularly in the past six years or so, and Mal always answered with a dismissive, childish shrug of “I don’t know.” He had delayed telling his mother about the matters that had arisen at the company for several days after they happened, largely because he did not want to hear her reaction. Mal was glad to have made the call prior to his grand realisation, however, because while he was now rather happy that things had turned out this way, at the time he was just wholly unconcerned with the whole situation. His mother had displayed a great deal of alarm and anger over the phone, so Mal had simply decided to let her do the emotions part for him. After all, he expected to eventually feel the same way too. It would have been infinitely more frustrating to hear her vicious tirade about corporate greed getting in the way of good careers when he was riding high on a sudden sense of freedom. Having neatly piled all his boxes in the hall, Mal decided to call it a night and clambered into bed feeling pleased with himself. He even cracked a smile, along with a vague laugh, after a week of being rather closed off from all emotions in his situational limbo. He wondered vaguely about his last bank statement. Perhaps it was time he got himself a flash car, too.